Article published in the Herald News, on September 2, 2013, by AARON BESWICK Truro Bureau (article in french below)

Activist promotes change for 50,000

Coady Chair at St. F.X. shares 40 years’ work organizing protests by the marginalized

ANTIGONISH — Rajagopal P.V. knows the power of putting one foot in front of another.

Because when there’s 100,000 of them heading toward a major city demanding change, feet matter.

“Can you imagine 50,000 people walking into a major city and sitting down?” asked the 2013 Coady Chair in Social Justice at St. Francis Xavier University.

“You’d shut the city down.”

For the next 21/2 months, the Indian activist will be sharing with students at the Coady Institute the wisdom that he’s earned over 40 years campaigning for the landless and marginalized in his home country.

Rajagopal will speak to the community leaders advocating for change who come from around the world to network and learn new organizing tactics at the Antigonish school for social justice.

He’ll talk about the long chain of factors that must be in place before organizing mass demonstrations, a chain that he said begins by fostering analytical thought and confidence among leaders at the grassroots level.

“You need to prepare people to understand the commitment it will take and the risk involved,” said Rajagopal, who refuses to use his last name to avoid association with any caste.

“You need them to understand strategies and consequences.”

Fifty thousand landless and impoverished Indians didn’t just appear behind Rajagopal last October to begin walking 350 kilometres toward New Delhi to demand that their own land be given back to them.

It took decades of building a movement for Rajagopal’s organization for social change, Ekta Parishad, to be able to feed and care for the population of a small city embarking on a journey.

“Seventy per cent of people in India live in rural areas where their only resources are the land, water and forests,” said Rajagopal.

“The current economic growth model sees those resources being taken from them and transferred to large companies.”

They walked for 11 days before a panicked Indian government sent officials with promises of land reform that would see at least a few of the nation’s estimated 170 million slum dwellers get access to small patches of earth to call their own. It was enough for Rajagopal to send his peaceful army home.

“The government came through on about 70 per cent of the deal we signed, which, considering the powerful lobbies stacked against us, was pretty good.”

In the relative backwater of Antigonish, Rajagopal is looking forward to time to think. The man who has never taken a vacation will be thinking of how to continue his cause by creating a political lobby for the poor in India’s 2014 election.

“India is a crude democracy where money power and muscle power are used by powerful lobbies. But there are not many who lobby for the poor. We need to create a lobby that works for a bottom-up development model that supports self-sufficient and self-governing villages.”